School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Colne Valley High School?

In 2026/27, Colne Valley High School offered 218 places and 194 families named it as their first choice.

Below: what an appeal in Kirklees actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.

0.89

first choices for every place available

194 first preferences for 218 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Colne Valley High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Colne Valley High School, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Kirklees as a whole and cover every state-funded school in the authority. Anyone quoting you odds for a named school is making them up.

Across Kirklees, 39.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 345 of 880 appeals heard in 2024–2026. The England figure is 20.1%.

A panel is not deciding whether you want the school. It decides whether the admission arrangements were lawful and correctly applied, and then whether the harm to your child of not being admitted outweighs the harm to the school of going over its published number. Cases built on preference rather than on those two questions are the ones that fail.

See the full appeal figures for Kirklees.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Kirklees ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.

How contested this school has been

Colne Valley High School turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Colne Valley High School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 0.87 per place 219 first choices 252 places 2016/17 0.9 per place 233 first choices 258 places 2017/18 0.92 per place 224 first choices 243 places 2018/19 0.82 per place 227 first choices 278 places 2019/20 0.92 per place 264 first choices 286 places 2020/21 0.96 per place 284 first choices 297 places 2021/22 0.99 per place 279 first choices 282 places 2022/23 1 per place 281 first choices 282 places 2023/24 1 per place 285 first choices 285 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 288 first choices 283 places 2025/26 0.94 per place 242 first choices 257 places 2026/27 0.89 per place 194 first choices 218 places
First preferences per place at Colne Valley High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 194 first preferences for 218 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Colne Valley High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 252 219 219 0.87
2016/17 258 233 233 0.9
2017/18 243 224 224 0.92
2018/19 278 227 227 0.82
2019/20 286 264 264 0.92
2020/21 297 284 274 0.96
2021/22 282 279 272 0.99
2022/23 282 281 277 1
2023/24 285 285 275 1
2024/25 283 288 281 1.02
2025/26 257 242 242 0.94
2026/27 218 194 194 0.89

Places offered

218

in 2026/27

Named first choice

194

354 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

194 of 194

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 211 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Colne Valley High School published for 2026 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Colne Valley High School, 2026 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Children looked after under an agreed series of short term placements (respite care) are excluded.
2 A child is regarded as having been in ‘state care outside of England’ if they were in the care of or were accommodated by a public authority, a religious organisation or any other provider of care whose sole purpose is to benefit society. Evidence must be provided by parents of the child’s adoption from state care outside England.
3 If a request for admission to school is made under the previously looked after (PLAC) criteria, an online supplementary information form (SIF) will need to be completed on the Kirklees Pupil Admissions website.
4 Children in priority 1 above may be admitted above the PAN.
5 The definition of an ‘older brother or sister attending’ means a sibling, half sibling, foster sibling or adopted sibling who is currently in Years 7-11 (inclusive) or adopted sibling who will be living with them at the same address at the date of their entry to the academy. This means the sibling will be in Years 7-11 (at the time of admission date). Please note that cousins do not count as siblings.
6 A child who is on roll at a Trust Primary Academy (presently Marsden Junior School) at the time of application will be allocated priority 3. • ‘Live’ means the child’s permanent home at the date when applications close or, if a significant house move is involved, the latest reasonable date before the final allocation of places.
7 Where a child’s parents live at different addresses and the child spends time at each address we will consider the following when deciding on the address that will be used for admissions purposes: ▪ the amount of time spent at each address ▪ which parent has parental responsibility for the child ▪ who receives child benefit for the child ▪ where the child is registered for medical and dental care ▪ any residency or custody orders made by the courts. We will ask for documentary evidence to support information given about the above points.
8 If a child is not admitted through priorities 2 to 5 above without exceeding the PAN, we will give priority up to the PAN to children living nearest the school.
9 Distance is measured in a straight line from a child’s home address to the school. Measurements are calculated using six-figure National Grid Co-ordinates taken from the National Land and Property Gazetteer. This grid reference refers to a point that falls within the permanent building structure corresponding to the address. The boundary of the building structure for the address is from Ordnance Survey's MasterMap. For smaller, residential properties the grid reference marks a point near the centre of the building. For larger properties, like schools with, for example, multiple buildings and large grounds, the grid reference relates to a point inside the main addressable building structure. […] criterion continues in the source document

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2026 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Colne Valley High School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

Was the school full?

This is the question a panel spends most of its time on. At the second stage of an appeal it weighs the harm to the school of taking an extra child against the harm to your child of being refused — and how much room the school has is the heart of that. The admission authority has to show harm over and above the fact that its published number has been reached, so it is fair to ask what the specific harm is — how the second stage actually works.

Places, Years 7 to 11

1,435

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,427

99.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

8

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

excluded from the figures above

Read this before you use these numbers

These are whole-school figures across Years 7 to 11, not the year group you are appealing for. A school can hold spare places in its upper years while the year you want is genuinely full, and the panel will have the year-group numbers in front of it. So this does not show that Colne Valley High School has room for your child.

They are also the school's own reported capacity, as at 1 May 2025 — a year behind the application figures further up this page, and a description rather than a finding.

On the published figures Colne Valley High School reported 8 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.4% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2014/15 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Colne Valley High School from 2014/15 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2014/15 1,435 places 1,141 on roll 2015/16 1,435 places 1,134 on roll 2016/17 1,435 places 1,179 on roll 2017/18 1,435 places 1,168 on roll 2018/19 1,435 places 1,227 on roll 2020/21 1,435 places 1,354 on roll 2021/22 1,435 places 1,376 on roll 2022/23 1,435 places 1,426 on roll 2023/24 1,435 places 1,428 on roll 2024/25 1,435 places 1,427 on roll
Whole-school figures including any sixth form, as at 1 May each year. 2019/20 is missing because the 2020 School Capacity survey was cancelled.

Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Academy sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kirklees

Postcode HD7 5SP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140660).

Other contested secondary schools in Kirklees

Applications and offers: Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27. Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England. Both under the Open Government Licence.